скачать книгу бесплатно
Ben leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, gazing at the ground between his feet and trying to understand. He knew Roberta well enough to know there was absolutely no point in trying to convince her to go home and wait for the police to do their job. And he couldn’t ignore the voice in his head reminding him of all the times he’d seen the cops botch everything up.
‘All right, then explain it to me,’ he said. ‘Someone murdered your friend, and now they’re coming after you, and it has something to do with this letter and a coded message. Who are they? What’s it about?’
Roberta paused to brush away a strand of dark red hair that had fallen into her eyes. Her brow was creased with strain. ‘Fact is, Ben, I think I know. Something tells me this all has to do with Claudine’s research.’
While they were deeply involved in their conversation, a hundred yards away at the other end of the park, a sleek black Audi saloon purred to a halt next to Roberta’s rental car. Its front doors opened and two men silently got out. Neither of them looked out of the ordinary. The one who’d been driving was in his early-to-mid thirties with nondescript brown hair and sunglasses, the other about ten years older, more heavily built, with a receding stubble of grey and eyes narrowed to slits against the early afternoon glare. They were casually dressed in jeans and lightweight jackets.
Neither spoke. As they both gazed impassively at the blue Vauxhall the older man was receiving instructions via a mobile phone. He listened until his instructions were complete, then gave a short nod to his colleague.
The driver opened the boot. He took out the black holdall from inside. It sagged heavily in his hand.
The two men scanned the near-empty park. Within a few seconds they’d located their target on the green wooden bench in the distance and taken note of the unknown male accompanying her. The men exchanged glances when they saw how the target’s companion was dressed.
It was no ordinary camera that was built into the mobile phone the older of the two men was carrying. He quickly, discreetly, used it to snap the figures on the bench, then redialled a number. ‘She’s not alone,’ he said when the voice replied on the line. ‘She’s talking to a priest.’
Pause. ‘Yeah, that’s what I said. I’m sending the image now. Got it?’
‘I’ve got it,’ said the gruff voice on the other end. ‘I see them. Okay, it’s her last confession. His too. Make it quick and quiet.’
The call was over. The two men divided the contents of the holdall. Then moved unnoticed around the edge of the park to their position.
Chapter Five (#ulink_cf9d8df9-a396-54e4-9a38-79de864cec5d)
The word research, from the lips of Roberta Ryder, held certain negative past associations for Ben. After all, it had been some bizarre experimental research of her own that had first not only brought them together but drawn the attention of ruthless people who’d very nearly succeeded in killing them both.
‘You told me Claudine was a lecturer,’ he said. ‘Lecturer in what?’
‘Physics,’ Roberta replied.
‘It doesn’t sound very dangerous.’
‘But then, what do you know about physics?’
He said nothing. Aside from weapons ballistics, the complexities of calculating long-range rifle bullet trajectories, the cold mathematics of war and destruction that he wanted to forget he’d ever learned, he didn’t know much.
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘Then I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a guy called Tesla? He was the subject of Claudine’s research, ever since I first knew her.’
‘Of course I’ve heard of him,’ he said defensively. ‘First to experiment with electricity, back in the nineteenth century. Made dead frogs’ legs dance about by passing current through them. I don’t see what—’
‘That was Galvani, Ben,’ Roberta interrupted impatiently. ‘I’m talking about the great Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla, born 1856. Actually I’m not surprised you didn’t know about him,’ she added after a beat. ‘I mean, everyone’s heard of the Marconis and Faradays and Edisons of this world, but Tesla’s the pioneer genius who somehow wound up forgotten. Which is pretty incredible, considering he came up with the principles behind wireless communication, remote control, radar, sonar, robotics, neon and fluorescent light, and foresaw the internet and cell phones as early as 1908. Not to mention his work on—’
‘I get the picture,’ Ben interrupted, knowing she was liable to launch into a whole science lecture if he didn’t break her stream.
‘I don’t know that you do get it,’ she said. She paused a moment. Gazed across the park, where the young mother was still pushing her son to and fro on the swing. The child was howling in delight as the swing’s arc carried him higher and higher.
‘Look at that,’ Roberta said, pointing. ‘That kid’s mother can’t weigh more than a hundred and five pounds soaking wet. She’s even smaller than I am. But see how little force it takes, at just the right moment, to make the swing go up high in the air.’ She looked round at Ben. ‘That’s what Claudine’s research was about.’
‘About shoving a kid back and forth on a swing?’
She tutted. ‘Don’t be so obtuse, Hope. It’s about the principle of resonance, the idea that tiny forces, precisely enough timed and placed, can accumulate to create massive energies.’
‘You’re going to have to be more specific.’
‘Okay, let me put it another way. The Earth’s vibrations have a periodicity of about an hour forty-nine minutes. In other words, if I were to hit something solid against the ground right now, it would send a wave of contraction through the whole planet that would return to the same point one hour forty-nine minutes later in the form of expansion. Follow me?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said.
Missing his sarcasm, she went on: ‘So you see, the Earth, like everything else, is in a constant state of vibration, ever expanding and contracting. Now imagine that at the exact moment when it begins to contract, I detonate a ton of high explosive in the exact same spot. That would accelerate the contraction, so that one hour forty-nine minutes later there would come back a wave of expansion that was equally accelerated. Now, if as that expansion wave began to ebb I set off another ton of explosive, and I kept repeating that pattern again and again … eventually, what do you suppose would happen?’
Ben looked blank.
‘It’s obvious, if you think about it. Given time, Tesla calculated that he could build up enough of an energy wave to split the Earth.’
‘Split the Earth,’ Ben repeated in a flat tone.
She nodded matter-of-factly, as if splitting the Earth were all part and parcel of a scientist’s everyday routine. ‘That’s the idea. See? Small input, big effect. Pretty much all of Tesla’s work was based on those principles, and that’s what Claudine was interested in. She was talking about it when I first met her, and she was still talking about it the last time we had a conversation on the phone, which was about five months ago.’
‘I still don’t understand where this is leading, Roberta.’
‘Let me explain a little more, okay? In the late nineteenth century Tesla invented a small hand-held device called the electro-mechanical oscillator. Based on the same kind of principles, he used it to show that even a subtle vibration, at just the right frequency, could unleash a whole lot of power. I mean enormous, and almost instantaneously. Enough to, say, bring down a building. A house, even a skyscraper.’
‘Sounds more like a bomb to me.’
‘No explosives involved,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘No noise or smoke, nothing chemical, just some basic mechanical moving parts powered by steam.’
‘Steam? What kind of bollocks contraption is that?’
‘A very simple one. Basically a miniature piston engine, with a small on-board boiler heated by internal combustion. In those days, steam was the only power source that could produce enough energy to operate the mechanicals. The whole thing was supposed to have been about six, seven inches long. You could carry it in your pocket.’
‘And use it to bring down a building.’
She nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘But it can’t split the Earth.’
‘Oh no, you’d need a bigger version to do that kind of damage.’
‘I would have hoped you’d do me more credit than to expect me to believe such utter bloody nonsense,’ he said. ‘I mean, come on.’
‘It really existed, Ben,’ Roberta insisted. ‘According to Tesla’s findings its theoretical potential was limitless.’
Ben was losing patience. ‘Theoretical, as in, it’s never actually been done or proved. This is what your friend was into? And you think this is why someone killed her? To do with some pie-in-the-sky notion that you can vibrate a building to pieces with some daft Heath Robinson device?’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Listen, I spent years in the army learning how to blow stuff up. Nobody can do it as efficiently as we did. Millions are spent developing high-tech explosives and training people like me how to use them without getting themselves blasted to smithereens. And a lot of people have been killed or maimed in the process of gathering that expertise. Don’t you think that if there were an easier way, Special Forces units would’ve latched onto it by now? Vibrations and steam,’ he added with contempt. ‘Splitting the Earth. Next thing you’ll be telling me about science fiction death rays.’
She blinked. ‘You knew about the Tesla death ray?’
Ben could see she was being earnest. ‘Now this is really getting crazy.’
‘Check out the evidence,’ she protested. ‘This is historic fact.’
Now Ben had run out of patience entirely. ‘Yeah, and “historic” is the key word here. It’s hardly the stuff that conspiracies are made of.’
‘You got one right here,’ she said fiercely. ‘You just can’t see it.’
‘What’s there to see?’ he said.
‘My friend’s body lying in the morgue, for a start.’
Ben couldn’t argue with that. ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry, but you think I’m full of shit.’
He threw up his hands in frustration. ‘I don’t know, Roberta. You come to me saying you’re in trouble, then you start talking about all this stuff, which, frankly, sounds to me like a load of … what do you Americans call it? Hooey. Just like all that alchemical stuff you were fixated on before.’
‘It is not hooey,’ she said firmly.
‘I can see you sincerely believe that. But what am I supposed to make of it? What can I do?’
She leaned close to him and replied, ‘Help me.’
‘What makes you think I even could?’
‘You’re Ben Hope. What more is there to say?’ She paused, looking entreatingly into his face. ‘You helped me once. It wasn’t so long ago. Won’t you help me again?’
He didn’t reply.
There was a long silence. The young mother had taken her child away from the swings and was holding his hand as they made their way along the tree-shaded footpath into the distance. The park was empty now, apart from just the two of them sitting on the bench.
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ Roberta said bitterly. ‘I’m wasting my time.’
‘I’m getting married in three days, Roberta,’ Ben said.
‘Yeah. Married. Thanks for reminding me.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Jesus, I remember it all so well, everything that happened between us. It seems like yesterday. Then that day you came to Canada to find me … I thought …’
‘Do we have to go over this?’ he said. ‘I came to make sure you were all right. And to say goodbye.’
‘I really cared for you. You know that, don’t you? We had something together.’
‘It wouldn’t have worked, Roberta. A guy like me – I don’t know. I was restless then. I just wasn’t ready to settle in one place.’
‘Or with one woman,’ she said. ‘But apparently, you are now.’
‘I told you. I’m different now.’
‘Or maybe you just found the right woman now.’ She let out a long sigh, then tried to smile. ‘That’s fine, Ben. I’m happy for you. I mean it. I can see now that I shouldn’t have troubled you. You’ve made a new life for yourself. Who the hell am I to turn up like this out of no place and disturb it?’
‘You know who you are to me,’ he said.
‘Was,’ she snorted. ‘I guess that’s ancient history too, huh?’ She started plucking at her handbag for her car keys. ‘Let’s go. I’ll drive you back to your domestic bliss. Then I’ll be gone, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.’
‘Hey.’ He reached out a hand.
She flinched away from his touch. ‘Don’t worry about me. I don’t need your help anyway.’ Her eyes had filled with tears again. She wiped them angrily away. ‘Shit, where’d I put the goddamned keys?’
Ben’s throat felt tight and he was confused with so many emotions. ‘You look tired, Roberta. Why don’t you stay a night or two at the vicarage? Jude would welcome having a house guest.’
She let out a mirthless laugh. ‘I suppose you’d want me to come to the wedding, too? Act as maid of honour or something? No thanks.’ Finding the keys, she stood up from the bench abruptly.
Ben opened his mouth to say something, but the words were still on his lips when the splinters flew with a sharp crack from the backrest of the bench and something smacked hard off the wall behind them.
For a short fraction of a second that seemed like a full minute, he stared at the small bullet hole that had appeared right where Roberta had been sitting just a moment earlier and only a few inches away from him.
Half a second was all the time he had to react before a volley of silenced gunfire erupted from across the park.
Chapter Six (#ulink_d6b86a2c-4089-5fb8-9e3d-7f9129181dd2)
In the same instant that splinters and pieces of tree bark exploded all around them, Ben jack-knifed violently over the back of the bench, grabbing Roberta’s arm and hauling her roughly down to the ground with him.
The gunfire paused for a heartbeat as whoever was shooting at them adjusted their aim. Then another volley of bullets churned up the ground and spat dirt around the base of the bench. A round screamed off the cast-iron leg Ben was pressed hard up against and he felt the hot copper-jacketed lead pass through his hair, millimetres from his skull.
Roberta was curled up in a ball on the ground, crying out in terror. Ben scrambled over to her to cover her body with his. With his face pressed down in the dirt he caught a momentary glimpse of movement among the bushes across the park. Even as he tried desperately to shield Roberta, some detached reptilian part of his mind was busy calculating the enemy’s position and strength.
Range: eighty yards. More than one shooter. Nine-millimetre subsonic ammunition, fully-automatic weapons fitted with sound moderators. This wasn’t local kids larking about with airguns. Conclusion: time to get the hell away from here before they both got shot to pieces.
In seconds, the bench was riddled with holes and offering less and less cover with every passing moment as bullets ripped through the weather-beaten wood and drilled into the ground, ploughed into the trees and threw up spatters of earth left and right. A howling ricochet off something hard and a shower of brick dust suddenly reminded Ben of the low wall behind the bench. In a momentary lull in the shooting as both gunmen reloaded their expended magazines, he sprang up, dragged Roberta bodily to her feet and half-threw, half-pulled her over the wall.
It was a four-foot drop down to the sloping grassy bank on the other side. The two of them hit the soft earth and went tumbling down the slope to the flat ground of the field adjoining the parkland.
Ben was first on his feet. ‘Are you hit?’ he asked urgently as Roberta stood uncertainly. ‘Are you bleeding?’ The shooting had stopped, and for the moment they were out of range of the gunmen. That wouldn’t be the case for long.
‘I don’t think so,’ Roberta answered. Her voice sounded faraway and dazed. Ben quickly inspected her for blood. He’d seen men mortally wounded who hadn’t even known about it for several minutes after getting shot. But Roberta’s only injury seemed to be the small cut to her brow where a flying splinter had broken the skin. ‘You’re okay. Stay there,’ he said, clambered back up the grassy bank and peeped over the wall.
He’d been right about a pair of shooters. He could see them now. The two men had emerged from the cover of the bushes. One was younger, taller, dark-haired, the other older and squatter. They looked fit and strong, and were running across the deserted park towards them with an air of absolute purpose. They were making no attempt to conceal the weapons in their hands. Few men in a vicar’s garb would have been able to make the identification, but Ben instantly knew the stubby black outlines of the Beretta MX4 Storm submachine gun. He’d had half a dozen of their civilian semi-automatic cousins locked up in the armoury at Le Val. The military version was a pure weapon of war. Totally illegal in most countries of the world. Extremely hard to obtain. The choice of professionals.
Who were these men? Ben didn’t have much time to consider the answer, or to yell at Roberta ‘What the hell have you got yourself mixed up in?’. The shooters were halfway across the park already, running fast. Ben slithered back down the bank and rejoined Roberta.
She still appeared stunned from the suddenness and violence of the attack. ‘They’re coming,’ he said. ‘Let’s move.’
‘Where to?’ she gasped, looking around her wide-eyed. Once they left the shelter of the wall, there’d be nothing around them but open field. The nearest cover was the half-built housing estate a hundred and fifty or more yards away, shimmering like a mirage in the heat haze.
Ben had already decided that was the only place they could run to. He could only pray that the gate he could see in the eight-foot wire mesh fence surrounding the building site wasn’t locked. He took her hand tightly in his, and they set off at a sprint towards the distant buildings. The grass was long and lush, and tugged at their ankles as they ran. Roberta stumbled over a rut and went down on one knee. As Ben helped her back to her feet he saw the two men clamber over the wall, spot them across the field and give chase. ‘Move!’ he rasped, yanking her arm.
The chatter of sound-suppressed machine-gun fire sounded from behind. Dirt and shredded grass flew up in Ben and Roberta’s wake.
One thing Ben knew for sure – the gunmen weren’t interested in catching them alive. They were shooting to kill.
He let go of Roberta’s hand and shouted ‘Zigzag!’ She glanced at him in stunned terror for an instant, then understood and began to imitate him as he tore through the long grass in a crazily erratic weave, like a hare trying to evade a chasing lurcher. A desperate strategy. It made them a harder target to hit at this range, but it also gave them further to run than their pursuers.
The wire fence was coming up fast. Signs on posts read DANGER: KEEP OUT and HARD HAT ZONE. Beyond the wire were bare-block buildings, construction skips, cement mixers, enormous mounds of sand, portacabins for the building crews. Ben’s jaw clenched tighter as he saw the heavy chain and padlock looped around the mesh gates. He glanced behind him. In a few seconds the shooters would be close enough to take them down easily.
